Searching for a Home :: Personal Narrative Essays

Searching for a Home I arrived "home" on Sunday night, from a two week vacation, which was nice in that we went to very nice places, and in that I had, for the first time in a while, the sort of vacation which did not involve a lot of driving around and which really succeeded in making me feel that I was gone, out of my real life, away, for a while. However, I did not succeed in accomplishing the mental task I had set out for myself for these two weeks. This task was I suppose a variant of the usual mental task I set for myself while traveling, anywhere, even for a short distance or a short time: to look at my life from as much distance as I can, to get a sense of the shape of the forest, removed from the detail/muddle of tree after tree, and to see what, if anything, needs to be changed, and maybe even how to change it. For me, actually, there always seems to be something that needs to be changed. This time in my travels, the questions I was trying to resolve, the new perspective I was trying to arrive at--not, by a long shot, for the first time--had something to do with the quotation marks I've put around the word home. To put it very simply, I don't feel at home here. I'd like to go home, but I'm not sure where that is. To make matters worse, I've been wondering about this for several years, like maybe fifteen or twenty years, trying one place after another. Nothing seems to fit. The fact that I know that this is at least 50% an internal problem (i.e., at least as much a matter of where I am psychologically as physically) does not, alas, help me to answer the question. It's clear to me I've come to focus on the question of place (the central question here being, where would I like to live for the rest of my life? where could I see myself living?) in the way that some people focus on Who Is the Right Person? or When/How/Why Must I Grow Up? Not that I don't obsess over these little matters, too, just that they don't take the central place in my reflections, most of the time.